Re: routable interfaces WAS( Re: [PATCH] hashed device lookup (DoesNOT meet Linus' sumission policy!)

jamal
2001-01-07T18:31:28Z

On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Ben Greear wrote:

> > My thought was to have the vlan be attached on the interface ifa list and
> > just give it a different label since it is a "virtual interface" on top
> > of the "physical interface". Now that you mention the SNMP requirement,
> > maybe an idea of major:minor ifindex makes sense. Say make the ifindex
> > a u32 with major 16 bit and minor 16 bit. This way we can have upto 2^16
> > physical interfaces and upto 2^16 virtual interfaces on the physical
> > interface. The search will be broken into two 16 bits.
>
> What problem does this fix?
>
> If you are mucking with the ifindex, you may be affecting many places
> in the rest of the kernel, as well as user-space programs which use
> ifindex to bind to raw devices.
>

I am talking about 2.5 possibilities now that 2.4 is out. I think
"parasitic/virtual" interfaces is not a issue specific to VLANs.
VLANs happen to use devices today to solve the problem.
As pointed by that example no routing daemons are doing aliased
interfaces (which are also virtual interfaces).
We need some more general solution.

cheers,
jamal